Earth

ITHACA, N.Y. - Race and ethnicity as a function of climate-change attitudes is the subject of a recent study by Jonathon Schuldt, assistant professor of communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and collaborator Adam Pearson, assistant professor of psychology at Pomona (Calif.) College.

Their work is documented in a paper, "The role of race and ethnicity in climate change polarization: Evidence from a U.S. national survey experiment," and is published online in the journal Climatic Change.

Since the 17th century, science was intrigued by the nature of light. Isaac Newton was certain that it consists of a stream of particles. His contemporary Christiaan Huygens, however, argued that light is a wave. Modern quantum physics says that both were right. Light can be observed both as particles and as waves -- depending which characteristic is measured in an experiment, it presents itself more as one or the other. This so-called wave-particle dualism is one of the foundational principles of quantum physics.

Water electrolysis has not yet established itself as a method for the production of hydrogen. Too much energy is lost in the process. Researchers have now doubled the efficiency of the reaction.

Plant cell walls are comprised of many complex polymers that require multiple different enzymes to fully break down, such as cellulase to digest cellulose and xylanase to digest xylan. For decades scientists thought only microbes could produce cellulase, until cellulase genes were found in wood-feeding insects. Now, new research from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, overturns another old theory.

How did Madagascar once slot next to India? Where was Australia a billion years ago?

Cloud-based virtual globes developed by a team led by University of Sydney geologists mean anyone with a smartphone, laptop or computer can now visualise, with unprecedented speed and ease of use, how the Earth evolved geologically.

Reported today in PLOS ONE, the globes have been gradually made available since September 2014. Some show Earth as it is today while others allow reconstructions through 'geological time', harking back to the planet's origins.

Washington, D.C.--For the first time scientists have looked at the net balance of the three major greenhouse gases--carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide--for every region of Earth's landmasses. They found surprisingly, that human-induced emissions of methane and nitrous oxide from ecosystems overwhelmingly surpass the ability of the land to soak up carbon dioxide emissions, which makes the terrestrial biosphere a contributor to climate change. The results published in the March 10, 2016, Nature, revises our understanding of how human activity contributes to global warming.

Stanford scientists have discovered a novel way to make plastic from carbon dioxide (CO2) and inedible plant material, such as agricultural waste and grasses. Researchers say the new technology could provide a low-carbon alternative to plastic bottles and other items currently made from petroleum.

All materials are made up of atoms, which vibrate. These vibrations, or 'phonons', are responsible, for example, for how electric charge and heat is transported in materials. Vibrations of metals, semiconductors, and insulators in are well studied; however, now materials are being nanosized to bring better performance to applications such as displays, sensors, batteries, and catalytic membranes. What happens to vibrations when a material is nanosized has until now not been understood.

Soft Surfaces Vibrate Strongly

A team of international scientists led by researchers of the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) and the Politecnico of Milan in Italy has demonstrated a novel approach for designing fully reconfigurable magnetic nanopatterns whose properties and functionality can be programmed and reprogrammed on-demand.

It's smaller than a grain of rice, yellowish, trapped in amber and lived 100 million years ago alongside dinosaurs. Meet Electrokoenenia yaksha, a newly described type of microwhip scorpion, or palpigrade, from Myanmar, whose minute fossilised remains have been found, trapped in Burmese amber. It has been described by an international team led by Michael S.

An international team of scientists led by Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem found a way to measure missing critical information needed to quantify manmade responsibility for climate change.

Bilberries -- a unique part of the Nordic diet -- could be utilised in higher amounts in food products to increase our dietary fibre intake. VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd took an interest in bilberry press cake and developed methods to use it as a dietary fibre source in tasty snacks.

Few of us pay attention to the minutiae of coffee stains' deposition patterns. However, physicists have previously explained the increased deposition of ground coffee particles near the edge of an evaporating droplet of liquid. They attributed it to the collective dynamics of ground coffee grains as the liquid evaporates along the contact line between the liquid coffee and the table. This kind of dynamics also governs microchip production, when particles are deposited on a substrate by means of solvent evaporation.

Participants in major political conferences could write a book about it: negotiations constantly fail due to the uncooperative and selfish behaviour of individual negotiators. This can be observed in the often fruitless attempts to reach a climate agreement over the years and the current difficulties in getting the EU states to agree on quotas for the acceptance of refugees. According to scientists from the Max Planck Society and Harvard University, this is due to the fact that people are more likely to choose representatives who use extortion as a negotiating strategy.

The Internet Time Service operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) serves much of the Earth, with customers from around the globe. In one month of study alone, just two of the 20 NIST servers that supply time information to Internet-connected devices received requests from 316 million unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, according to detailed data about the service published for the first time. This represents at least 8.5 percent of devices on the entire Internet.